Does women's greater fear of snakes and spiders originate in infancy?

1 Original Article
2 Does women's greater fear of snakes and spiders originate in infancy? ☆
3 David H. Rakison ⁎
4 Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
5 Initial receipt 26 September 2008; final revision received 3 June 2009
6 Abstract
7 Previous studies with adult humans and nonhuman animals revealed more rapid fear learning for spiders and snakes than for mushrooms
8 and flowers. The current experiments tested whether 11-month-olds show a similar effect in learning associative pairings between facial
9 emotions and fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant stimuli. Consistent with the greater incidence of snake and spider phobias in women, results
10 show that female but not male infants learn rapidly to associate negative facial emotions with fear-relevant stimuli. No difference was found
11 between the sexes for fear-irrelevant stimuli. The results are discussed in relation to fear learning, phobias, and a specialized evolved fear
12 mechanism in humans.
13 © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
14
15 Keywords: Infancy; Fear; Snakes; Spiders; Sex differences; Cognition
16
17 1. Introduction
Evolution and Human Behavior xx (2009) xxx–xxx
18 The evolved function of fear is to organize responses
19 when confronted with a particular kind of adaptive problem,
20 namely, danger. Over evolutionary time, specific dangers
21 were recurrent, and there would have been intense selection
22 pressure for the emergence of psychological mechanisms
23 that facilitate fear learning for them (Öhman & Mineka,
24 2001). Two recurrent dangers to humans from other species
25 throughout human and primate evolution were spiders and
26 snakes (Öhman & Mineka, 2003). Fear of these nonhuman
27 animals is common in adults and children, and they elicit
28 phobias in approximately 5.5% (snakes) and 3.5% (spiders)
29 of the population (Fredrikson, Annas, Rischer, & Wik,
30 1996). Moreover, there is a consistent sex difference in the
31 incidence of snake and spider phobias; women are four times
32 more likely than men to have fears and phobias for these, but
33 not other stimuli (e.g., injections, heights, and flying)
34 (Fredrikson et al., 2006; Marks, 1969; Rose, Miller,
Q1 35 Pogue-Geile, & Cardwell, 1981).
Is part of this greater
36 incidence of snake and spider fear in women the result of a
specialized evolved fear mechanism? This question was 37
examined in the two experiments reported here.
38
It is particularly important for fear learning of specific 39
threats to be facilitated by an evolved psychological 40
mechanism because it is not adaptive to learn about the 41
potentially dangerous nature of, for example, snakes and 42
spiders by being bitten and killed. According to Öhman, 43
Flykt, and Esteves (2001) and Öhman and Mineka (2001), 44
human and nonhuman primates possess an evolved fear 45
mechanism for fear-relevant stimuli such as snakes and 46
spiders that is selectively responsive to and is triggered by 47
such stimuli. This fear mechanism predisposes children and 48
adults to attend to snakes and spiders and prepares them to 49
rapidly learn to associate the appropriate emotional 50
response—namely, fear—with such stimuli.
51
There is now considerable evidence from adults, children, 52
infants, and nonhuman primates to support this view. For 53
example, human adults show superior conditioning for 54
images of snakes and spiders with a mid shock than for fear- 55
irrelevant stimuli such as flowers, mushrooms, or electric 56
outlets (Öhman & Mineka, 2001). Human adults and 57
children also more quickly detect snakes against a back- 58
ground of flowers or mushrooms than flowers or mushrooms 59
against a background of snakes (Lobue & DeLoache, 2008; 60
Muris & Mercklebach, 2001; Öhman et al., 2001). There is 61 Q2
also evidence that 7- to 18-month-old infants (both boys and 62
UNCORRECTED PROOF
☆ This work was supported by a grant from the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development (R03HD049511-01).
⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: rakison@andrew.cmu.edu.
1090-5138/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2009.06.002
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ENS-05585; No of Pages 7

63 girls) associate snakes with fear because they look longer at
64 movies of snakes paired with a frightened human voice than
65 movies of snakes paired with a happy human voice
66 (DeLoache & Lobue, 2009). Furthermore, infants at 5 months
67 of age look longer at a schematic image of a spider than a
68 partly or completely scrambled image of a spider but do not
69 do so for schematic and scrambled images of a flower
70 (Rakison & Derringer, 2008). Finally, there is also evidence
71 that rhesus monkeys reared in the laboratory associate snakes
72 with a fearful response from another monkey more quickly
73 than they associate flowers with a fearful response (Cook &
74 Mineka, 1990).
75 According to Error Management Theory (EMT) (e.g.,
76 Haselton & Buss, 2000), many judgment and decision-
77 making adaptations are designed by natural selection to be
78 biased to err in the direction of lower survival or
79 reproductive cost. This view predicts that humans' fear
80 mechanism may be designed to be particularly sensitive to,
81 or prepared for, pairings of negative emotions and specific
82 recurrent threats because the fitness cost of not learning such
83 pairings would be high [see also Nesse's (2001) “Smoke
84 detector principle” that defenses are often expressed too
85 readily or too intensely]. It is plausible that this may be the
86 reason why so many individuals develop an irrational
87 aversion, or phobia, of a recurrent threat, which is consistent
88 with the fact that phobias tend to be related to evolutionarily
89 relevant stimuli (e.g., snakes, spiders, heights, and people).
90 Why, then, should women be more likely than men to
91 develop phobias for snakes and spiders? There are a number
92 of plausible explanations for this sex difference. One
93 possibility is that social transmission of fears and phobias
94 is more common or promoted among women than men
95 (Fredrikson, Annas, & Wik, 1997). Alternatively, women's
96 fear mechanism may be more sensitive to snakes and spiders
97 than males' fear mechanism because women were more
98 exposed to them over evolutionary time (e.g., during child
99 care, while foraging and gathering food). It is also feasible,
100 as predicted by EMT, that a fear of snakes and spider was
101 particularly important in women because it protects both
102 their child and themselves. In other words, the fitness costs
103 of being bitten by a snake or spider would have been greater
104 for women than for men because infants and young children,
105 historically, rarely survived a mother's death (Buss, 2008).
106 Finally, because of the higher reproductive variance for men,
107 evolution would have selected against males with overly
108 powerful fears because it could have inhibited risk taking
109 involved in, for example, large game hunting.
110 The current experiments were designed to establish
111 whether, indeed, the basis for adult females' greater
112 incidence of fear and phobias for snakes and spiders is
113 rooted in an evolutionary mechanism that is present in
114 infancy. According to EMT, the nature of this evolved
115 mechanism would lead female infants to show an advantage
116 over male infants in learning associations between snakes
117 and spiders and a negative facial emotion but would not do
118 so for fear-irrelevant stimuli. Alternatively, work by
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2 D.H. Rakison / Evolution and Human Behavior xx (2009) xxx–xxx
DeLoache and Lobue (2009) in which no sex differences
were found suggests that both boys and girls should show an
advantage for learning associations between recurrent threats
and a negative facial emotion relative to associations
between non-threats and a negative facial expression. It is
also plausible that an evolved fear mechanism is agnostic
about the emotion to be paired with a recurrent threat, which
suggests that boys and girls should show an advantage for
learning associations between recurrent threats and any facial
emotion relative to learning associations between non-threats
and a facial expression. Note that although any of these
findings would provide evidence for the presence of an
evolved fear mechanism in infants, they would not
necessarily rule out any of the evolutionary explanations
presented above for why women are more likely than men to
develop fears and phobias for recurrent threats. Finally, if
fear learning is unrelated to a specialized evolved mechanism
and is underpinned by more general learning mechanisms,
infants should not show any difference in learning associations
between facial emotions and threats or non-threats.
2. Experiment 1
In this experiment, 11-month-old infants were tested in
the visual habituation paradigm with an adaptation of the
Switch design. Infants were habituated to a single color
photo of a spider or a snake paired with either a happy or a
fearful schematic face. In the test phase, infants were
presented with a novel spider or snake paired with a different
face (e.g., happy if habituated to a fearful face) as well as a
mushroom or flower paired with the same novel face. As
outlined above, if infants possess a specialized evolved fear
mechanism, then girls but not boys, or both girls and boys,
who were habituated to the fearful face paired with a snake or
spider should look longer at the novel pairing between the
snake or spider and a positive facial emotion relative to the
novel pairing between the flower or mushroom and a
positive facial emotion. In contrast, if phobias for snakes and
spiders are grounded in general learning mechanisms and not
evolved specialized learning mechanisms, then boys and
girls would be expected to look longer at the novel test trial
with the snake or spider regardless of the facial emotion
presented during the trial (i.e., fearful or happy face).
UNCORRECTED PROOF
3. Method
3.1. Participants
Participants were 20 healthy full-term infants with a mean
age of 11 months 9 days (range: 10 months, 13 days to
11 months, 22 days). There were an equal number of boys
and girls. An additional 8 infants were tested but not
included in the final analysis because of failure to habituate
(n=5), experimenter error (n=1), or looking more than 2 S.D.
beyond the condition mean (n=2).
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169 3.2. Materials and design
170 During the pretest, infants were shown two stimuli (snake
171 or spider and mushroom or flower) one at a time to determine
172 any a priori preferences. They were then habituated to events
173 in which the target stimulus (the snake or spider shown
174 during the pretest) was presented on the left side of the screen
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for 2 s after which the schematic face (either happy or
fearful) appeared on the right side of the screen. Both images
remained motionless on the screen for another 7 s. The kind
of face (happy or fearful) paired with the stimuli in
habituation was counterbalanced across infants. A blue
occluding screen lowered and rose between each event
(lasting 0.5 s each). There were two trials in the test phase. In
UNCORRECTED PROOF
Fig. 1. Stimuli used in Experiments 1 and 2. The upper part of the figure shows the two schematic faces used during habituation and the test trials. The lower part
of the figure shows the four snakes, spiders, flowers, and mushrooms used in the pretest, the habituation, and test trials.
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182 the fear-relevant trial, infants were shown a novel snake or
183 spider stimulus with a different face from that seen during
184 habituation. For example, if infants were habituated to a
185 snake paired with a fearful face in the test trial, they would
186 see a new snake paired with the happy face. In the fear-
187 irrelevant trial, infants were shown a novel mushroom or
188 flower paired with a different face from that seen during
189 habituation. For example, if infants were habituated to a
190 snake paired with a fearful face in the fear-irrelevant test trial,
191 they would see a mushroom paired with the happy face. The
192 rationale for this design is that if infants during habituation
193 associated the snake or spider with the face stimulus, they
194 should look longer at the snake or spider paired with a
195 different face than at a novel stimulus (flower or mushroom)
196 paired with a novel face.
197 The stimuli were four color photographs of spiders and
198 four color photographs of snakes (see Fig. 1). There were
199 also two different drawings of faces, one depicting a happy
200 emotion and one depicting a fearful emotion (see Fig. 1). The
201 habituation, test, and control stimuli, as well as the pairing
202 between face type and stimulus, were counterbalanced
203 across infants.
204 3.3. Procedure
205 Each infant sat on his or her caretakers' lap in front of a
206 computer screen (size: 14 in.×24 in.; distance: 24 in.). The
207 pretest stimuli appeared on the monitor for a maximum of
208 20 s or until the infant looked away from the monitor for 2 s.
209 During the habituation phase, each event was presented until
210 the infant visually fixated away from the monitor for over 1 s
211 or until 20 s of uninterrupted looking had elapsed. The
212 habituation phase ended when an infant's looking time for a
213 block of three trials decreased to 50% of that recorded during
214 the first three trials. The test trials were presented until the
215 infant looked away for more than 1 s or after 20 s of
216 continuous looking. A green expanding and contracting
217 circle on a black background with a synchronous bell sound
218 was presented prior to the first habituation trial and between
219 each habituation and test trial. The primary experimenter
220 coded the looking time behavior online by pressing and
221 releasing a preset keyboard key. A second judge who was
222 blind to the hypothesis and which trial was presented
223 recoded the looking times from a videotape of the session.
224 Interrater reliability in all of the experiments reported here
225 was N97%.
226 3.4. Results and discussion
UNCORRECTED PROOF
227 The first preliminary analysis examined looking times to
228 the two pretest items with a mixed-design analysis of
229 variance (ANOVA) with sex (male vs. female) as a
230 between-subjects factor and stimulus (fear-relevant: snake/
231 spider vs. fear-irrelevant: mushroom/flower) as a within-
232 subjects factor. The analysis revealed no significant main
233 effect for stimulus [F(1,18)=0.01, pN.9, ηp 2 =0.00] or sex
234 [F(1,18)=1.18, pN.2, ηp 2 =0.06] and no significant interaction
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4 D.H. Rakison / Evolution and Human Behavior xx (2009) xxx–xxx
Fig. 2. Infant looking times for male and female infants in the two test trials
in Experiment 1. Error bars represent standard error.
2
between the variables [F(1,18)=0.25, pN.6, ηp=0.01]. Thus,
there were no a priori preferences among the girls or boys
for the two kinds of stimuli.
A second set of preliminary analyses compared the
number of habituation trials and the total looking time during
habituation for the girls and boys. The analyses revealed that
girls (mean=10.00; S.D.=2.98) and boys (mean=10.40;
S.D.=3.98) required a comparable number of trials to
habituate [t(18)=0.25, pN.8] and that girls (mean=106.37;
S.D.=61.33) and boys (mean=112.42; S.D.=59.62) looked
equally long overall during habituation [t(18)=0.22, pN.8].
The main analysis used a mixed-design ANOVA with
test trial (fear-relevant vs. fear-irrelevant) as the withinsubjects
factor and habituation face (happy vs. fearful) and
sex (male vs. female) as between-subjects factors. Infants'
looking times are presented in Fig. 2. The analysis revealed
a significant interaction between the sex of the infant and
2
test trial [F(1,16)=8.40, pb.01, ηp=0.34], which was
moderated by a significant interaction between habituation
face, sex of the infant, and test trial [F(1,16)=5.17, pb.05,
ηp 2 =0.24]. There were no other significant effects [all
pN.2]. Planned comparisons indicated that girls who were
habituated to the fearful face paired with the spider or
snake looked significantly longer at the fear-relevant test
trial (mean=17.54; S.D.=3.38) than at the fear-irrelevant
test trial (mean=10.02; S.D.=5.08) [F(1,4)=31.24, pb.005,
2
ηp=0.88]. In contrast, girls who were habituated to the
happy face paired with the spider or snake looked equally
long at the fear-relevant test trial (mean=6.42; S.D.=5.96)
and fear-irrelevant test trial (mean=5.50; S.D.=4.96)
[F(1,4)=0.44, pN.5, ηp 2 =0.09]. The analyses also revealed
that boys looked equally long at both trials regardless of
the habituation stimuli [all pN.4].
4. Discussion
These data show that girls, but not boys, who were
habituated to a fearful face and a recurrent threat looked
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271 significantly longer when a novel snake or spider was paired
272 with a different facial emotion relative to when a mushroom
273 or flower was paired with the same facial emotion. This
274 suggests that female infants associated the snake or spider
275 seen during habituation with the fearful facial emotion and
276 generalized it to the novel snake or spider in the test trials.
277 The same effect was not found for male infants who were
278 habituated to the fearful face or for male or female infants
279 who were habituated to a pairing of a happy face with a
280 recurrent threat.
281 5. Experiment 2
282 An alternative explanation for girls' looking pattern in
283 Experiment 1 is that they are highly attuned to learn the
284 pairing between a negative emotion and any stimulus. If this
285 were the case, the results of the first experiment would be
286 unrelated to learning about the pairing of a fearful emotion
287 with snakes or spiders per se. To test this explanation, we
288 designed Experiment 2 to be identical with the first
289 experiment except that infants were habituated to a single
290 color photo of a fear-irrelevant stimulus (i.e., mushroom or
291 flower) paired with either a happy or a fearful schematic
292 face. As in Experiment 1, infants were then tested with a
293 novel mushroom or flower, as well as a novel spider or
294 snake, paired with a different facial emotion to that seen
295 during habituation.
296 5.1. Participants
297 Participants were 20 healthy full-term infants with a mean
298 age of 11 months 4 days (range: 10 months, 11 days to
299 11 months, 18 days). There were an equal number of boys
300 and girls. An additional 7 infants were tested but not
301 included in the final analysis because of failure to habituate
302 (n=1), experimenter error (n=3), fussiness (n=2), or looking
303 more than 2 S.D. beyond the condition mean (n=1).
304 5.2. Materials and procedure
305 The stimuli in the experiment were identical with those
306 in Experiment 1; however, pictures of mushrooms and
307 flowers served as the habituation stimuli. All other aspects
308 of the design and procedure were the same as those in
309 Experiment 1.
310 5.3. Results and discussion
UNCORRECTED PROOF
311 Analysis of the pretest trials revealed no differences in
312 looking times for the spider/snake and mushroom/flower
313 across all the infants [F(1,18)=0.05, pN.8, ηp 2 =0.01] or for
314 male and female infants [F(1,18)=0.31, pN.5, ηp 2 =0.02].
315 There were also no differences between the males and
316 females in the number of habituation trials [t(18)=0.33,
317 pN.7] and the total looking time during habituation
318 [t(18)=1.20, pN.2].
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Fig. 3. Infant looking times for male and female infants in the two test trials
in Experiment 2. Error bars represent standard error.
As in Experiment 1, the looking times on the two test
trials (see Fig. 3) were entered into a mixed-design ANOVA
with test trial (fear-relevant vs. fear-irrelevant) as the withinsubjects
factor and habituation face (happy vs. fearful) and
sex (male vs. female) as between-subjects factors. The
analysis revealed no significant main effect for test trial, sex
of the infant, or habituation face [all pN.1]. Crucially,
however, there was no significant interaction between sex of
2
the infant and test trial [F(1,16)=0.65, pN.4, ηp=0.04] and no
significant interaction between habituation face, sex of the
infant, and test trial [F(1,16)=0.41, pN.5, ηp 2 =0.03].
These results show that male and female 11-month-olds
did not learn the relation between either a positive or a
negative facial emotion and a mushroom or flower. This
implies that the different behavior of female infants relative
to male infants in Experiment 1 was not due to a general
advantage in encoding a pairing between a negative facial
emotion and a second stimulus but was specific to
associative learning for spiders and snakes.
6. General discussion
The two experiments reported here show that female
11-month-olds—but not males of the same age—learn the
relation between a negative facial expression and fearrelevant
stimuli such as snakes and spiders. Importantly, the
same effect was not found for paired associate learning
between facial emotions and fear-irrelevant stimuli such as
mushrooms and flowers. As such, the current data support
the hypothesis that women may be more predisposed than
men to learn the appropriate emotion for nonhuman animals
that were recurrent threats over evolutionary time. Note,
however, that the results should not be interpreted to mean
that males are unable to learn relations between facial
emotions and fear-relevant stimuli. Rather, the data suggest
that female infants are able to do so after a relatively brief
5
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353 experience and that male infants may require a longer period
354 of exposure to such stimuli.
355 The results of the present experiments are consistent with
356 a large body of work that has shown a differential response
357 by humans and primate to fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant
358 stimuli. Work with captive monkeys, for example, showed
359 that they can rapidly be taught to fear snakes but not
360 flowers through social referencing (Cook & Mineka, 1990).
361 Similarly, research with human adults revealed that
362 conditioned fear is more resistant to extinction with fear-
363 relevant (e.g., snakes) than with fear-irrelevant stimuli (e.g.,
364 flowers) (Öhman & Mineka, 2001). Although infants in the
365 current experiments were not taught fear for specific
366 stimuli, these data are the first to show a differential
367 response by female infants to such stimuli. Previous
368 research with infants on this issue has failed to detect
369 such a sex difference, perhaps because of limited sample
370 sizes (e.g., DeLoache & Lobue, 2009). The current
371 experiments indicate that humans possess a specialized
372 evolved fear mechanism, that it is operational in the first
373 year of life, and that it is particularly sensitive in females.
374 The results also are consistent with the idea that infants
375 possess a perceptual template that specifies the structure of
376 snakes as well as spiders (Rakison & Derringer, 2008). It is
377 this template that “prepares” infants, particularly female
378 infants, to attend to fear-relevant stimuli and learn the
379 appropriate negative emotional response for them.
380 The finding that female infants—but not male infants—
381 learn associations between fearful facial emotions and fear-
382 relevant stimuli suggests, albeit tentatively, that the greater
383 fear and phobic incidence in female children and adults may
384 be partially based on differently functioning fear mechan-
385 isms. According to evolutionary theory, and in particular
386 EMT (e.g., Haselton & Buss, 2000; see also Nesse, 2001),
387 there would have been powerful selection pressure for
388 women to err on the side of caution with regard to recurrent
389 threats such as snakes and spiders. This may have been
390 because they would likely have encountered them often
391 during foraging and gathering and because of the potential
392 cost to themselves and their offspring. There would also
393 have been less selection pressure for men to avoid these
394 threats because of the need for risk-taking behavior such as
395 hunting (Buss, 2008). Unfortunately, the current data do not
396 help to determine which, if any, of these explanations are
397 more veridical.
398 It could be argued that the current findings do not
399 provide evidence of a fear mechanism for snakes and
400 spiders because women and girls have substantially more
401 phobias and fears of all types than do men and boys. Thus,
402 it is not that women or girls have a specific spider and snake
403 fear mechanism but rather they have a general bias to
404 develop fears and phobias more than men and boys. There
405 are at least two reasons to reject this claim, however. First,
406 although women and girls tend to have a greater number of
407 phobias than men and boys, significant sex differences are
408 found only for evolutionarily relevant stimuli (e.g., snakes,
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spiders, closed spaces, and darkness) and not for more
modern fear-related stimuli (e.g., injections, flying, and
dentists) (Fredrikson et al., 1996). This suggests that
women—and men—may have a number of specialized
evolved fear mechanisms rather than a general tendency to
develop phobias for any and all stimuli. As discussed
above, it is possible that women are more likely than men to
develop phobias for these evolutionarily relevant stimuli
because of the potential survival cost to their child.
Second, if women—and female infants—have a general
tendency to develop fears and phobias for all stimuli that
are paired with a negative emotion, then in the current
experiments, they should have associated the fearful face
with the mushroom or flower. However, infant girls tested
here associated only the snakes and spiders, and not the
mushrooms and flowers, with the fearful face. Why, then,
does an evolved fear mechanism cause sex differences in
learning at such an early age? One compelling possibility
is that they are preparatory for the development of the
later sex differences in fear learning found in human
adults. An alternative, though not mutually exclusive,
explanation is that our ancestors were highly likely to
encounter recurrent threats in infancy and early childhood
and it is therefore adaptive for a fear mechanism to be online
early in life.
To conclude, the current experiments provide the first
evidence that the greater incidence of snake and spider fears
and phobias in women may have its origins in infancy.
Clearly, however, caution is necessary at this point because
the current experiments show only that female infants have
an advantage over male infants in associating fearful
schematic faces with fear-relevant stimuli. It remains to be
seen whether this form of associative learning is the same as
that involved in fear learning in infancy and beyond.
Nonetheless, the approach taken here, in conjunction with
recent work with infants and young children (DeLoache &
LoBue, 2009; LoBue & DeLoache, 2008; Rakison &
Derringer, 2008), demonstrates that a developmental perspective
can provide considerable insight into the evolved
psychological mechanisms of adults.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Gabriel Smith, Jessica
Jankowitsch, Katie Andreasson, and the rest of the staff of
the Infant Cognition Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon
University for their help with data collection and participant
recruitment. He would also like to thank two anonymous
reviewers and Martie Haselton for excellent suggestions and
critiques during the review process.
UNCORRECTED PROOF
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